Posts Tagged ‘darkwood’

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I rearranged all of my furniture yesterday so that I could play a game and it’s not even a game with a stonking great dancemat or waving and waggling control scheme. I’ve been dungeon crawling.

This weekend, the stars aligned and I finally sank around fifteen hours into one of the big games waiting in my backlog. If I’m being honest, I shouldn’t look to the stars – I spent fifteen hours or thereabouts with Legend of Grimrock 2 because of the flurries of sleet that kept me huddled beneath a duvet, grimacing at the outside world.

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Noct [official site] is a top-down horror game in the tradition of Teleglitch and Alien Breed. It’s grainy, thermal-imaged satellite-view is the antithesis of a sedate bird’s-eye-view, stripping away tactical oversight and contemplation. Noct is one of several recent games to create a tense and claustrophobic experience by twisting a typically expansive, liberating and distancing viewpoint. We covered it when it arrived on Kickstarter and since then it’s been picked up by Devolver and is preparing to enter Early Access. It looks splendid, as you can see for yourself in the embedded footage and teaser trailer below.

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I’ve been looking forward to Darkwood for a long time. It’s a top-down survival horror game with crafting elements, but early videos contained a hint of surrealism that helped the game to stand out from the crowd. Now that it has launched in Early Access, I’ve spent an hour exploring the early stages. It’s a slow-paced Teleglitch, a survival horror game by way of Ice-Pick Lodge and Stalker. A few interface issues aside, it lives up to expectations in grand style. There are some spoilers for the prologue section below and I reckon it’s worth going in completely cold, but fear not – I’ll provide a second spoiler warning before going into detail.

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Darkwood is a shining light in the coming night. Leading ludotechnicians now agree that by the year 2018, every game will be either a roguelike Metroidvania, an Ubi-style open world murder simulator, or a survival-based endurance test in the style of Day Z. Acid Wizard’s first title straddles these genres, being described as “a top-down, open world surreal horror experience with a randomized world”, but it manages to look entirely different to anything else out there. A new trailer, with slight interactive elements, demonstrates the appeal of the unusual setting and its uncanny inhabitants.

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Darkwood! It was fright at first sight when I saw the first trailer for your procedurally generated top-down horror shenanigans. There was crafting, barricading of doors, and even surreal and comically unnerving conversations with inanimate objects. The lighting effects created a suitable atmosphere and the darkness was filled with weirdness and tension rather than hordes of slobbering beasties. The game is currently creeping down the Indiegogo route but is more than $10,000 short of its $40,000 goal with only nine days to go-go. New alpha footage may help to win over the doubters.

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Adam’s trousers haven’t been the same since he glimpsed top-down survival horror Darkwood. His favourite britches, woven from Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher’s eyebrow hairs and blessed by Morrissey, are now in a box and buried in consecrated ground. It was the overwhelming flood of terror juice he experienced at the indie RPG’s trailer. If you’d like to help the development team ruin pantaloons everywhere, they now have an IndieGoGo pitch.Read the rest of this entry »

Darkwood is a top-down, oldschool survival horror set in a procedurally generated, open world. It features RPG and roguelike elements, with intense combat and a eerie atmosphere.

They say ‘oldschool’, ‘they’ being the three folk from Poland who are making the game, but in many ways Darkwood appears to be using all the modern tricks of the trade. Procedurally generated maps, with randomised events and locations, and worrying sanity effects abound. The video shows the player setting up barricades to keep out…something…and, as everybody should be aware, barricades are an essential ingredient in true horror.